A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign

If you are still upset, for any reason, about the 2012 elections, you should read this book immediately. It contains a wonderful tonic called "historical perspective" that will cure what ails you. If you think that our political climate today is especially toxic, divisive, or mean spirited, you should read it too. You will learn that most important of all lessons: that you are wrong. America is not more divided today than it has ever been. We are not even close.Edward Larson does a good job of explaining all of the reasons that the Election of 1800 was such a disaster. It all boils down to this: the people who wrote the Constitution did not envision permanent political parties who would run candidates for public office. Men such as Alexander Hamilton and James Madison were suspicious of parties, and they crafted a Constitution that would minimize the possibility of permanent factions emerging. And then, two of America's most brilliant and dedicated statesmen ruined it all by creating political parties anyway. Their names? Alexander Hamilton and James Madison.From George Washington's first term in office, it was clear that there were two basic ideas about how America should work. Hamilton believed that the Constitution provided for a robust national government with near-absolute taxing powers and the ability to do anything that needed to be done to build America's economy and its infrastructure. Jefferson and Madison, on the other hand, believed that the national government should be small, that taxes should be low, that states should make most of the major decisions, and that America did not need any economic development beyond a lot of new land to farm. By 1798, those who held the first set of views were called "Federalists," while those who held the second were called "Republicans." And, before the election of 1800, both Federalists and Republicans caucused together (secretly) to select their nominees for President and Vice President. The Federalists chose the incumbent president, John Adams, and South Carolina's Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Republicans chose their hero, Thomas Jefferson, to run for President, and the New York Senator Aaron Burr to run for Vice President.Well, sort of. As a matter of fact, there was no way under the Constitution to run candidates for President or Vice President. Presidents were chosen bv electors, rather than by popular votes, and electors where chosen however states wanted to choose them: some were appointed by state legislatures and others were elected in general plebiscites. Electors were required to cast two equal votes for President; they could not specify that one was for Vice President. Whoever got the most votes became the President, and whoever came in second became the Vice President.What this really means, then, is that all four men--Adams, Jefferson, Pinckney, and Burr--were running for President, and they all knew it. A number of "High Federalists" (i.e. really conservative Federalists) tried to engineer a victory for Pinckney, viewing Adams as too moderate and politically unreliable--a Federalist in Name Only, or FINO, who could not be trusted to keep the forces of Republicanism at bay. They were playing a very dangerous game, though, since any vote against Adams could have the unintended consequence of electing Jefferson. Of course, nobody on either side thought that anybody other than Jefferson from the Republican side could become President--nobody, that is, except Aaron Burr, who actively schemed to make sure that no Republican voted for Jefferson but against him. He played hard for a tie, and he won, throwing the election into turmoil for months while the House of Representatives tried to come up with a President.I learned a lot from this book about the intraparty intrigues on both sides. Much more interesting (to me, at least) was the absolute certainty on the part of both Federalists and Republicans that American democracy would be destroyed if the other side won. It all sounded so modern to me. Republicans believed that Adams and the Federalists had designs to destroy the Constitution, appoint a president-for-life, and return the nation to monarchy. Politicians and pundits argued that America was at a crossroads that would lead, if Jefferson were not elected, to the end of everything that the Constitution and the Revolution stood for. Federalists, for their part, saw Jefferson and his fellow Republicans as lawless, degraded, atheistic Jacobins (French Revolutionary rabble) bent on destroying both religion and the upper classes. Nothing, they believed, could be more important than defeating Jefferson.As the election played out, both sides worked themselves into a frenzy of hatred and anger against the other side (sound familiar). At the same time, the High Federalists worked hard against their own ostensible candidate for President, while the second Republican on the ticket schemed to replace his boss. And he almost did. Throw into the mix a plot to disqualify Republican electors, an attempt to change the way New York's electors were chosen, a few high-profile show trials under the Alien and Sedition Acts, a slave rebellion, a secession threat secretly written by one of the candidates, a few high-profile, high-sleaze campaign books--and what do you get? Business as usual in the early American republic.Since writing  That's Not What They Meant!: Reclaiming the Founding Fathers from America's Right Wing , I have often been asked what the Founding Fathers would have thought about political civility in our day. They would have thought, I reply, that we have entirely too much of it.

Recent American history has seen some fairly contested, highly partisan Presidential elections. In 1992 we saw the most successful run by a third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1916. In 1996, we saw Republicans fresh off an historic take-over of Congress convinced they could defeat a sitting President. In 2004, the race between Bush and Kerry brought up memories of a war that had ended almost thirty years in the past. And, of course, 2000 saw the closest and most controversial Presidential election since Rutherford B. Hayes defeated Samuel Tilden.But nothing that we've experienced can compare to the first partisan Presidential election in American history, the election of 1800.In A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign, Edward Larson tells the story of a campaign that changed the way we elect Presidents and changed the course of American history.Prior to 1800, the United States had not had a contested Presidential election. George Washington ran essentially unopposed in 1788 and 1792, and could have done the same in 1796 if he had chosen to. In the campaign of 1796, the partisan alignments that Washington had resisted and naively hoped would not come about were still forming. There were two factions, for sure, but formal political parties were still a few years away. The seeds for what would happen for years later, though, were planted when the Electoral College selected a President (Adams) and Vice-President (Jefferson) from opposing factions.By the time the election of 1800 approached, those factions had developed into true political parties. The Federalists dominated New England and much of the North, the Republicans the South. Up for play, and all important to the election of 1800 were mid-Atlantic states like Pennsylvania.In a relatively short, easy to read 276 pages, Larson takes the reader form one part of the country to the other as the two parties, and the factions within them, struggle to navigate the sometimes byzantine way in which President's were picked in the late 18th century.In addition to Adams and Jefferson, much time is spent on the role played by two bitter political rivals who would eventually end up on a dueling field overlooking Manhattan Island -- Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. In 1800, Hamilton and Burr battled in the even-then rough and tumble world of New York City politics. The New York legislative elections would determine who won that state's electoral votes and Burr put together a strategy to win the city, and the state, from Hamilton. Hamilton, meanwhile, was fighting two enemies; the Republicans and John Adams who he believed had betrayed Federalist Party principles during his time in office. By October, Hamilton would openly break with Adams and back Vice-Presidential candidate Charles Cotesworth Pinckney for President, thus guaranteeing a Federalist loss and the end of the Federalist Party.One of the more extraordinary things about the election was the fact that neither Jefferson nor his supporters seemed to realize that Burr, through the guarantees he had exacted from them, had virtually guaranteed that the two men would end up tied in the Electoral College and the election would be thrown to the Federalist dominated House of Representative. In the end, after thirty-six ballot, the House choose Jefferson and American history was set on a new course.Larson's book is an excellent read for anyone interested in electoral politics and American history.